Related papers: From old wars to new wars and global terrorism
The Roman Empire shaped Western civilization, and many Roman principles are embodied in modern institutions. Although its political institutions proved both resilient and adaptable, allowing it to incorporate diverse populations, the Empire…
The Syrian civil war has been ongoing since 2011 and has already caused thousands of deaths. The analysis of death tolls helps to understand the dynamics of the conflict and to better allocate resources to the affected areas. In this…
In this paper, I empirically investigate how the openness of political institutions to diverse representation can impact conflict-related violence. By exploiting plausibly exogenous variations in the number of councillors in Colombian…
Modern armed conflicts have a tendency to cluster together and spread geographically. However, the geography of most conflicts remains under-studied. To fill this gap, this article presents a new indicator that measures two key geographical…
We examine statistical pictures of violent conflicts over the last 2000 years, finding techniques for dealing with incompleteness and unreliability of historical data. We introduce a novel approach to apply extreme value theory to…
Terrorism has become one of the most tedious problems to deal with and a prominent threat to mankind. To enhance counter-terrorism, several research works are developing efficient and precise systems, data mining is not an exception.…
The size that an epidemic can reach, measured in terms of the number of fatalities, is an extremely relevant quantity. It has been recently claimed [Cirillo & Taleb, Nature Physics 2020] that the size distribution of major epidemics in…
The American Indian war lasted over one hundred years, and is a major event in the history of North America. As expected, since the war commenced in late eighteenth century, casualty records surrounding this conflict contain numerous…
After the peace agreement of 2016 with FARC, the killings of social leaders have emerged as an important post-conflict challenge for Colombia. We present a data analysis based on official records obtained from the Colombian General…
Cirillo and Taleb [Nature Phys. 16, 606-613 (2020)] study the size of major epidemics in human history in terms of the number of fatalities. Using the figures from 72 epidemics, from the plague of Athens (429 BC) to the COVID-19…
Terrorists use violence in pursuit of political goals. While terror often has severe consequences for victims, it remains an open question how terror attacks affect the general population. We study the behavioral response of citizens of…
This paper investigates the origins of Islamist insurgencies as a form of cultural revival in West Africa. Exploiting variation in access to ancient water sources, which have largely disappeared, as an instrument, we show that the decline…
Major revolts have recently erupted in parts of the Middle East with substantial international repercussions. Predicting, coping with and winning those revolts have become a grave problem for many regimes and for world powers. We propose a…
Urban scaling theory posits that urban indicators follow power-law relations with population, yet the evolution of these patterns - and the role of regional differences in settings marked by social inequalities and unplanned urbanization -…
We report on a quantitative analysis of relationships between the number of homicides, population size and other ten urban metrics. By using data from Brazilian cities, we show that well defined average scaling laws with the population size…
We study how religious competition-defined as the entry of a religious organization with innovative worship practices into a predominantly Catholic municipality-affects domestic violence. Using municipality-level data from Colombia and a…
This work systematically conducts a data analysis based on the numbers of both cumulative and daily confirmed COVID-19 cases and deaths in a time span through April 2020 to June 2022 for over 200 countries around the world. Such research…
We study the distribution of 2,837 inter-murder intervals (cooling off periods) for 1,012 American serial killers. The distribution is smooth, following a power law in the region of 10-10,000 days. The power law cuts off where inter-murder…
Existing models of political violence often emphasize discrete transitions, when conflicts emerge, escalate, or subside, without considering the longer trajectories of violence that accumulate across time and space. This paper introduces a…
It appeared recently that the underlying degree distribution of networks may play a crucial role concerning their robustness. Empiric and analytic results have been obtained, based on asymptotic and mean-field approximations. Previous work…